On the trade-off of power consumption and time synchronization quality in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this work we find a lower bound on the energy required for synchronizing a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based on clock estimation techniques. The energy required for synchronizing a WSN is specified by both the transmit power and the required number of messages in order to achieve a desired estimation error level. This paper brings two main contributions: 1. A general relationship between the energy spent in the transmission and the clock offset estimation error by means of the number of transmitted messages, for both large-scale and small-scale wireless channel fading. 2. An optimal lower bound on the required energy and the number of messages by minimizing their product.